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Why do animals respond to homeopathy?

arthwollipot

Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
arthwollipot
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It's an often-made claim that animals respond to homeopathy.

Homeopathy's effects on people can be ascribed to placebo. But animals (not being very smart in most cases) can't be affected by placebo, because they don't know that the painful needle that the vet is sticking into them is supposed to help them to feel better. HOMEOPATHY WORKS OMGZ!!1!!

So what's the argument to use when someone trots out this as "proof" of homeopathy?
 
arthwollipot said:
It's an often-made claim that animals respond to homeopathy.

Homeopathy's effects on people can be ascribed to placebo. But animals (not being very smart in most cases) can't be affected by placebo, because they don't know that the painful needle that the vet is sticking into them is supposed to help them to feel better. HOMEOPATHY WORKS OMGZ!!1!!

So what's the argument to use when someone trots out this as "proof" of homeopathy?
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Placebo is a combination of what was going to happen anyway and wishful thinking. It's just that with animals, the wishful thinking is on the part of the person trying to decide how the animal feels - "he looks to have a little more spring in his step, don't you think?"

Linda
 
This from UK Skeptics:

What is really happening, is that the vet who is using homeopathic remedies, is using his authoritative position to convince the animal owner that the animal being treated with homeopathy is getting better.

Vets, like doctors, hold a lot of power over their clients; this leads to a placebo effect by proxy where the animal’s owner may be satisfied and reassured that the animal is responding to treatment; but of course the animal remains medically untreated.


http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.php?dir=articles&article=it_works_in_animals.php
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maybe the better question is 'why do people percieve that animals respond to homeopathy?'. its not like animals can very well tell you if they feel better.

and they should probably provide proof of it curing things that arent effected by that... a tumor growth or something maybe. something measurable by other means.
 
Animals do not respond to homeopathy. The problem lies in the bias of the experimenter. In a properly blinded (medical) trial, it's not only the patient and the doctor who are blinded as to who gets what, the person evaluating the results must also be blinded. Homeopaths don't believe in blinding experiments (it's soooo closeminded Western science), so they know that an animal has been treated and therefor they'll see an improvement. This isn't fraud on their part, it's just human psychology. From Wikipedia:
"Experimenter's bias is the phenomenon in experimental science by which the outcome of an experiment tends to be biased towards a result expected by the human experimenter. The inability of a human being to remain completely objective is the ultimate source of this bias."
That is what's going on. Note also that in homeopathic experiments with animals, they almost always treat something that is measured rather subjectively, such as libido, nervousness, 'energy' etc.
 
fls said:
Placebo is a combination of what was going to happen anyway and wishful thinking. It's just that with animals, the wishful thinking is on the part of the person trying to decide how the animal feels - "he looks to have a little more spring in his step, don't you think?"
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And often, of course, they will actually get better, either through spontaneous (i.e. unconnected with any treatment given) improvement, as a result of simultaneous treatments other than the homoeopathy or changes to the animal's general treatment, or through regression to the mean (in chronic conditions, new treatments are likely to be sought when the condition as particularly bad, and a return to "normal" can be claimed as a positive effect for whatever treatment has been used).

Homoeopathy relies on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The fact that an apparent improvement followed the homoeopathic treatment does not mean that the treatment caused the improvement. Double blinded studies of veterinary homoeopathy have found that it doesn't work (there are only about half a dozen studies; I don't have the references to hand but I'm sure Rolfe can supply them).

See also the 2005 Bristol Outpatients Study, which seems to have been designed to exploit the post hoc fallacy, and which was trumpeted to the world as evidence that homoeopathy works.
 
fls said:
Placebo is a combination of what was going to happen anyway and wishful thinking.
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I'm not sure that's true.

If you do a trial where one group gets nothing and the other gets a placebo, are the results always identical?

I thought one had to use placebos in clinical trials specifically because in some cases just giving someone a sugar pill they think is medicine can have a reproducible effect
 
fls said:
Placebo is a combination of what was going to happen anyway and wishful thinking.
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That seems an oddly ignorant description of the placebo effect. It's much more complex than that, and your throwaway line mischaracterises it. I would expect someone in your position to be far more accurate.
 
Beausoleil said:
I'm not sure that's true.

If you do a trial where one group gets nothing and the other gets a placebo, are the results always identical?

I thought one had to use placebos in clinical trials specifically because in some cases just giving someone a sugar pill they think is medicine can have a reproducible effect
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Yes, giving someone a sugar pill does produce a reproducible effect. Specifically, in the subject, it can alter subjective perceptions including perception of pain. "Wishful thinking" is my way of gathering subjective perceptions in the subject and the various cognitive biases that may influence the experimenter's assessment into one term. "Wishful thinking" has a powerful effect.

Linda
 
Gurdur said:
That seems an oddly ignorant description of the placebo effect. It's much more complex than that, and your throwaway line mischaracterises it. I would expect someone in your position to be far more accurate.
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I do strive for single line descriptions that can capture the complexity and subtlty of thousands of pages of information. That you would consider chastizing me for failing (although it does depend upon how you would define "wishful thinking" and "what would happen anyway" - which arguably defeats the purpose of using a single line, I suppose) tells me that you think it possible for me to succeed. Thank you! This gives me the confidence to press on!

Linda
 
Gurdur said:
For fear of worse things happening to them.
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I'm sure our oldest cat would be happier right now if we had treated her neck rash with homeopathy. It returned after the effects of an earlier cortisone shot took the symptoms away for several weeks. Now she had biopsy taken of the affected skin, and we're forcing her to wear soft wraps on her hind legs for a couple of days so she can't scratch the stitches in the area. Right now she hates closed-minded, non-holistic, evidence-based Western veterinary medicine from the bottom of her little feline heart.
 
Gurdur said:
That seems an oddly ignorant description of the placebo effect. It's much more complex than that, and your throwaway line mischaracterises it. I would expect someone in your position to be far more accurate.
Click to expand...

Care to provide us with a better description?
 
Beausoleil said:
I'm not sure that's true.

If you do a trial where one group gets nothing and the other gets a placebo, are the results always identical?

I thought one had to use placebos in clinical trials specifically because in some cases just giving someone a sugar pill they think is medicine can have a reproducible effect
Click to expand...

One problem with giving one group a homeopathic remedy and another a placebo is that you're in fact comparing one placebo with another. There is almost always an improvement (because of the placebo effect, regression to the mean, the natural course of the disease etc) and one always does a little better than the other by pure chance. Sometimes the placebo, sometimes the homeopathic remedy, albeit not statistically significant. The homeopaths will mention the ones where homeopathy does better and forget the ones where the placebo did better. And they cherrypick data. If a few patients (or even one) show significant improvement, they'll take those and leave out the rest. And if you repeat the trial often enough, sooner or later you will end up with a statistically significant result by pure chance. Which is of course the reason why results have to be repeated by others. And which is where homeopathy utterly fails.
 
Drummer said:
One problem with giving one group a homeopathic remedy and another a placebo is that you're in fact comparing one placebo with another. There is almost always an improvement (because of the placebo effect, regression to the mean, the natural course of the disease etc) and one always does a little better than the other by pure chance. Sometimes the placebo, sometimes the homeopathic remedy, albeit not statistically significant. The homeopaths will mention the ones where homeopathy does better and forget the ones where the placebo did better. And they cherrypick data. If a few patients (or even one) show significant improvement, they'll take those and leave out the rest. And if you repeat the trial often enough, sooner or later you will end up with a statistically significant result by pure chance. Which is of course the reason why results have to be repeated by others. And which is where homeopathy utterly fails.
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Blue pills "work" differently to Pink ones.
 
A few relevant examples. The last one is particularly interesting.

I remember a paper in the Veterinary Record a few years ago. It was about a herbal remedy, not homoeopathy, but the principle was the same. Basically, there were two groups of dogs with arthritis, one on the real herbal goo, and one on fake herbal goo. There were three methods of assessing the degree of lameness. One objective method, involving walking on force plates, also subjective assessments by both the owners and the attending vets.

The snag was that the blinding was broken. The herbal goo made some of the dogs on it smell funny. The effect of that was in fact to unblind the vets (who has the opportunity of noticing that several dogs in the trial smelled funny) more so than the owners, who were less likely to notice the relevance of the smell noticed in just their own animal.

Results: Vets (unblinding more of an issue) reported significantly better outcomes in treated compared to placebo.
Owners (maybe some of them had their suspicions) reported a better outcome in the treated group, but this was not statistically significant.
Force plates showed that all the animals were just as lame as one another.

Rolfe.
 
I would also suspect some studies will get the Clever Hans effect.

If the humans believe the animal is getting a treatment, their expectations can be inadvertently communicated to the animal which could affect even "objective" measures.

BTW, participants in this thread (so far) are strictly "the choir" we're all preaching to, right?
 
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